Transnational Maternal Genealogies in Contemporary Canadian Women’s Historical Novels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is a sustained analysis of transnational maternal genealogies in contemporary Canadian women’s historical novels written in English. In contrast to conventional historical novels which privilege the lives of men, women’s historical novel centralizes women’s lives. Experiences such as pregnancy, rape, childbearing and rearing, breast cancer, and so on are prioritized. My article concentrates on the creation and expression of transnational maternal genealogies as manifest in an increasing number of contemporary historical novels by Canadian women. Beginning with Joy Kogawa’s seminal novel Obasan, published in 1981, I trace the trajectory of this gendered genre to recent times with Padma Viswanathan’s The Toss of a Lemon. Transnational maternal genealogies differ from other dominant trends in the genre such as masculinist mainstream historiography and “historiographic metafiction” because the genre contends that gender and a link to one’s maternal past, not the national context, is paramount to lived experience. Furthermore, transnational female characters challenge “traditional boundaries of historical fiction,” Canada’s official history, and claims as to who is and who is not Canadian. Despite the critical acclaim and notoriety many Canadian women novelists enjoy, this genre has attracted little scholarship, thus this article partakes in the critical work which can and should be done to remedy this gap.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".